


the ghost in your eyes

by chainofclovers



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F, Post-Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-19 05:34:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29869923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainofclovers/pseuds/chainofclovers
Summary: When Grace tries to trace the path and capture for herself how they ended up here, even the most recent memories are fragments, the excavation imperfectly complete.
Relationships: Frankie Bergstein/Grace Hanson
Comments: 12
Kudos: 37





	the ghost in your eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SapphicScholar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphicScholar/gifts).



> This story is for SapphicScholar, whose _Grace and Frankie_ stories about lesbian/bi/queer pride and self-discovery are some of my faves. She prompted "For your prompt requests: anemoia, an internet neologism to describe nostalgia for something you've never had/lived. A former student introduced it to me, and my mind immediately jumped to G&F fanfic..."
> 
> I love this prompt for a lot of reasons. Many years ago my now-wife (then not-yet-a-girlfriend) and I coined a neologism about a feeling of preemptive nostalgia for a life you're not yet leading or could be leading! So "anemoia," which feels like the same concept but applied to the past, kinda blows my mind a little even if our word sounded nothing like it. And in _Grace and Frankie_ , both canonically and in fan works, Grace and Frankie's relationship is life-saving. Their story arc is about a total re-prioritization and re-imagining of what their lives can be. It's really beautiful, and the idea of anemoia fits incredibly well with their story (even if Grace doesn't use the term nostalgia to describe her anemoia) and gave me the chance to play indulgently with the slipperiness of time.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this tiny story; I really enjoyed writing it.
> 
> Title is a line from the song "Black Rainbows" by Cut Copy.

There’s always a point when it stops being difficult to do the right thing. When you commit and the path solidifies and right is a better fit than wrong. 

That’s how it is with Frankie. With being together.

When Grace tries to trace the path and capture for herself how they ended up here, even the most recent memories are fragments, the excavation imperfectly complete.

_Frankie’s voice in the dark: you don’t have to have all the answers, you don’t have to know exactly what you want to do_

_Frankie’s hands on her skin: the way their grip grounds her and spins her free_

_Frankie’s closeness as they fall asleep together every night: after years full of separations, it’s been weeks since they’ve parted for longer than the length of a pharmacy run or a few hours with a friend_

_Frankie as beholder: of orgasms, of breakdowns, of pulling back together, of things she names beauty_

_Frankie’s sundrenched bed: the long afternoons like something out of time, the woozy slump of evening hours after it happens again_

Being with Frankie is easy; it’s the past that’s painful to bear. History is documented in a way the present moment isn’t yet, and Grace can’t consider her place in the past without haunting herself, without all the missed possibilities rearing their beautiful heads.

Nearly every day, Frankie waves her phone in Grace’s face to show her the latest Instagram post from @lgbt_history. Grace smiles and nods at the images, looks just long enough to avoid rudeness, and passes the phone back without saying much. 

She’s been alive since November 1939. She could be in practically every photo. One of a thousand faces in the crowd at a march. Half of a couple perched at a table at the Gateways. A comforting presence at the bedside of an emaciated man dying of AIDS. She chucks a brick at a cop when she’s finally had enough. She wears a pink triangle on her lapel; Silence = Death. She holds Frankie’s hand in hers in the street, at the beach, in a crowd, alone in the solace of the bedroom. 

She could have been anywhere, but when she looks at the past she wants to witness—she wants to witness it just as much as Frankie does—she’s never there. Never a participant in that history. Instead, she spent nearly an entire life in a state of hostile compliance. She lived in a series of houses, each larger than the last. She made a series of business deals, a series of romantic connections, and achieved a decent percentage of the standard set of milestones. She’s proud of her daughters, proud of Vybrant, proud of what she has with Frankie. She knows that’s more than a lot of people get. She doesn’t know how—without sounding ungrateful or unhinged or both—to explain that she wants to go back in time without losing what she has today, that she wants to keep everything she’s got _and_ to travel back for more. To turn the things that are important to her at eighty-one into the things that were important to her at twenty-one, forty-one, sixty-one. 

“Does it make you feel weird to look at these?” Frankie asks one evening in bed, taking her phone back after showing Grace a post about Audre Lorde’s birthday. She frowns. “You don’t seem that into it, but I know how you are when you actually aren’t into something, and this isn’t that.” 

“She was born only five years before I was,” Grace says. “And, and obviously she died way too soon, but she figured out a lot of stuff in the time she was given.” 

Frankie nods thoughtfully. “It’s true.” She plugs her phone into the charger on the nightstand, sets it screen-side down.

“I feel like such a poser every time you show me those posts,” Grace admits. “I didn’t suffer. I didn’t celebrate the victories like they were my own. I didn’t help anyone.”

“You just have sex with me and prosper?”

“Pretty much.” 

Frankie laughs. “Could be worse as far as lesbian starter packs go.” 

Grace smiles, the relief of her admission as heady as the relief that Frankie can joke her way through this conversation. “You’re more than a starter pack and you know it.” 

“Yeah, I kind of do know that.” Frankie looks at her, serious this time. “And you’re not a poser, okay? You can’t help it that you were busy being compulsory heterosexualized when all those gay pictures were taken. That’s what was happening to you instead. To both of us, which is why I’ve become such an @lgbt_history superfan. And it sucks. But, you know, it ended. And now you get to chill with me at the beach and do whatever you want.” 

“Except time travel.”

“Right,” Frankie says. “Everything you want except time travel.”

They might be wrong about time travel, blessedly wrong. It’s a new thought, a slippery thought. It comes to Grace as the conversation ends and they sink into a kiss that’s happening right now, on February 18, 2021 in La Jolla, California. In the morning, the unidirectional timeline will force tonight into history. In the morning the memory of the kiss will feel potent as the kiss does. She slips more deeply into it, slips into Frankie, her hand between her legs, her mouth falling to her neck, proud to be able to predict one small slice of the future. Frankie smiles up at her and it gives Grace the courage to imagine something bigger. She imagines a crowd, a crowd that hasn’t gathered yet, and a place for them both in the street.

**Author's Note:**

> If you have a moment, I'd love to know what you think. Thanks so much for reading. <3


End file.
